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SPEAKER_03: So real quick, a little background. A few months ago, TED had its countdown summit in Detroit, Michigan. This was a TED conference entirely dedicated to accelerating solutions to the climate crisis by turning ideas into action. So listen, like you, I have heard a lot of the bad news, but I did not know how much good news there is out there, too. And making it ended up making me feel so much more optimistic about our future.
SPEAKER_13: There's no doubt that we are facing exponential impacts of climate change. There is also, however, no doubt that that is being met with exponential progress of the technologies that can help to address climate change. So what we have here is, frankly, a race between two exponential curves.
SPEAKER_03: Christiana Figueres is the former head of U.N. Climate Change and the architect of the landmark 2015 Paris Accords. You'll hear from her and other incredible speakers about their personal stories dealing with climate change and their tested solutions.
But first, let's get a quick reminder on the basics. Climate change in a minute. Or so.
SPEAKER_12: The air we breathe has changed. The mix of gases is shifting with more and more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. And the shift is happening faster each year.
In just a few hundred years, fossil fuels formed over eons have been burned as coal, oil and gas. The exhaust has transformed the entire atmosphere and ocean. It's like a pollution blanket and the result we know as climate change.
The planet has already warmed more than one degree Celsius and is on a path to heat up even more. That may not seem like a lot, but it's already caused major destruction across the globe.
To give us some room to breathe, the world must reduce greenhouse gas pollution by more than 7% each year, every year of this decade.
There are a number of ways to do that. Let's start by looking at the greenhouse gases themselves. CO2 makes up nearly 75% of the pollution emitted each year. And then there's methane, or natural gas, which makes up 17%.
Finally, there's nitrous oxide, making up 6% of the problem. There are other greenhouse gases, but these three make up the bulk of the climate challenge. Where do they come from?
There are several ways to break down the sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Here we're using the public climate watch data.
Start with energy. The majority of modern energy comes from burning fossil fuels, which makes the energy sector 76% of the climate challenge, including the fuels used for transportation, industrial processes and agricultural production.
Farming and animal raising also have to change as agriculture accounts for 12% of greenhouse gas pollution. The remaining 12% comes from a grab bag of human activities, like industrial heating, clearing forests and more.
This is the climate challenge we face. Going from adding billions of metric tons of greenhouse gases to the air each year to adding zero. Will it be easy? No. Can we do it? Yes, if we choose to.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so that's the situation. Where do we go from here? Well, we've all heard of a tipping point. That moment when an idea or concept finally takes hold and then changes the world.
Well, the UN's climate chief, Simon Steele, believes we are almost at a tipping point for massive action on climate change. And to get you ready, he wants to take you back to the early 90s when he was an executive at Nokia and the world wasn't sending text messages yet.
SPEAKER_08: I want you to imagine it's 1992 and you're talking to a telecoms expert. She tells you that mobile phone text messaging is going to fundamentally change the way we communicate.
What do you think? Why on earth am I going to go from this to tapping on a screen with my fingers and my thumbs?
But then after a slow start, text-based services exploded. This paved the way for the smartphone revolution.
I know how much we struggle to comprehend and predict what exponential change means because I was at Nokia in 1993 when that technological revolution started.
And now, as head of UN climate change, I'm here to tell you that what was true for mobile phones is also true for climate action today.
We're here in Detroit, the heart of car manufacturing. Electric vehicle sales are expected to increase to become 70% by 2030.
Another example, solar energy. Between 2010 and 2020, we moved from 20 gigawatts of solar energy installed to 150 gigawatts.
And by 2030, that number is expected to increase again to 1,000 gigawatts per year. Change can come fast.
Here are some other expert voices, including Christiana Figueres and many others, all on this idea of exponential change.
SPEAKER_02: So exponential change means that change happens very slowly at first and then comes a tipping point and suddenly things accelerate and accelerate and accelerate.
SPEAKER_01: It's a mathematical term, but it means basically stuff happens very slowly and then it goes really fast. Governments and experts have consistently underestimated the pace and scale at which we can deploy renewable energy and how quickly renewable energy and the associated technologies become affordable.
SPEAKER_00: I predicted in 2011 that we'd have solar as cheap as coal in some parts of the world by 2015 and half the cost of coal by 2020.
And everyone thought I was crazy, I've got to say, almost. And in fact, I was wrong. The actual decline in the cost of solar happened twice as fast as I thought it would.
Solar prices today are a century ahead of where the world's leading energy experts thought they'd be in 2010. It's now spreading from solar. So it's happening also in the wind sector, it's happening in the battery sector, it's happening in the electric vehicle sector.
SPEAKER_13: I don't think that we do a good job in communicating the fact that we are progressing more than is commonly known.
The human brain is trained best at thinking about linear change. But when you think about an exponential curve next to a line, at first the exponential curve is below the line and so it's moving more slowly than you would think.
SPEAKER_07: And then it crosses the line and it's moving faster than you would think. We call it cautious optimism. We're very hopeful about the trajectories that we've seen, but we shouldn't let up yet. OK, we are in an exponential mindset. And as you heard, one example of exponential growth might be sitting in your driveway right now.
SPEAKER_03: Electric vehicles are finally really happening, which means that people here in Detroit are rethinking the auto industry. They're rethinking their jobs, their identity.
Take Cynthia Williams, head of sustainability at Ford. I sat down with her at Lucky Detroit, a local coffee and barber shop, where she told me that there are three things that need to happen for electric vehicles to go to the next level, from this tipping point to exponential growth.
SPEAKER_04: The three things for me are change, collaboration and capacity. So the change piece of it is changing the way folks think about the vehicle, making sure that they understand we're bringing a better vehicle to the customers.
So you don't have to make a sacrifice in order.
SPEAKER_04: I think one of the things we need to do is actually get people in the cars and show them how fun it is. And it's no different. It's just powered by a battery.
We are at a tipping point. We're at a point of acceleration of electric vehicles.
Many are calling it the electric vehicle revolution. Now with that comes unprecedented change that will require us to build new capacity and collaborate in ways that we've never seen before.
To make things happen faster, you have to think different. You can't just collaborate with the same people because you get the same answer right.
You need to broaden your collaboration space, go outside of your industry, understand what worked in Norway, for example, to get them to where they are.
SPEAKER_03: Where's the weak link, Cynthia? What's the thing that you're like, that if we don't push through that, we may not get to this full adoption?
The critical things that we hear from the consumers is they need infrastructure. That's what it's taking for us to work with governments to make sure that we bring more charging to everyone, whether it's rural, urban, wealthy, low-income. We all need charges.
SPEAKER_04:
We have about 145,000 gas stations here and only about 23,000 fast charges in the United States. And I'm not saying we need one on every corner, but we do need many, many more. When we start building out the charging infrastructure, we need lighting. We need security, shelter. We need restrooms. We need other amenities so that people know where to go, where to charge.
SPEAKER_04: Next comes capacity. We have to invest in new facilities and talent. Now, that's true for any industry transitioning to greener goals and strategies.
And we're investing in talent. We're investing in education and training. And we're also listening to the communities where we live and operate.
So a young Cynthia Williams now, your counterpart who's studying engineering, will she be learning something very different if she wants to go and work in the automotive industry in Detroit?
SPEAKER_04: There'll be different options, right? And so I'm a mechanical engineer by trade, but I think there'll be opportunities for electrical engineering, software engineering, and there's even certificates that students can get.
Instead of going through a four-year college, it's the proper training to get them right to be dedicated to build the vehicles that we need for the future. At the end of this year globally, we'll have the ability to produce 600,000 electric vehicles. And in 2026, we'll have a global goal to produce 2 million electric vehicles. And it just goes up from there.
SPEAKER_03: What is this going to look like, this growth for me in the next couple years, in five years, in 20 years? Clean air. That's what I look at. If you think about when we were during the pandemic, when everybody stopped driving and they were at home, clear skies and moving to zero tailpipe emission vehicles.
SPEAKER_04:
And if you chose an electric vehicle, that's you participating and you contributing to a better world, to a better future. We have come a long way. It's so gratifying to see electric vehicles on the road, to move from aspiration to reality, to see plants dedicated to building electric vehicles.
We have the technology, we have the leadership, we have the ingenuity to respond to the environmental crisis with courage.
And I'll tell you, as a person who's dedicated my entire career to sustainability, the road ahead is paved with promise.
SPEAKER_03: Next up, we're going to hear about another area of rapid growth, renewable energy. Carbon scientist Julio Friedman believes that all the advances in solar and wind are a great omen for what could be just around the corner.
But we need to change the narrative first.
SPEAKER_11: I think we need a compelling vision of the future that gets people excited about the energy transition and solving climate change. Right now, it's like we're at a restaurant and there's two options. Burnt toast, unflavored oatmeal. And people are not excited about either, right? The burnt toast option for me is what I call the big switch. Everything's the same, it's just clean. But it costs a lot of money and it's super hard to do.
The other vision is kind of like, thou shalt not. That vision is a narrower sort of eat your peas, hair shirt kind of vision of the future.
SPEAKER_11:
And a lot of people don't want that either. And there's nothing in the physics, chemistry or biology that says we can't have a super interesting, exciting, vibrant world.
SPEAKER_11:
And that is compelling in a way that we have not heard yet.
Help me out here. What does that even look like?
SPEAKER_11: So, for lack of a better word, I like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Okay, I'll go with you.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_11: A place like Wakanda, right? It's got flying cars, it's got maglev trains, and it's a totally fabulous place to live, they've got lots of food. That is built on abundant, sustainable, cheap energy. Okay, so, like, we're not Wakanda, we're not in the Marvel Universe, this is real life, sort of.
SPEAKER_11: How do we make this possible?
SPEAKER_11: So what can you actually do here on Earth constrained by economics and engineering and all the rest of it, right? And the answer is we can do an incredible amount.
Abundant, available where you want it, when you want it. Everybody should have energy, including the three billion people who use less electricity than my refrigerator uses.
Well, the good news is every day the Earth receives 163,000 terawatts of energy from the sun. About half of that bounces back to space, but about 80,000 terawatts arrive at the Earth in a form we can use. For reference, today the world uses about 26 terawatts of energy, and we've got more than solar and wind. We have geothermal, we have hydro, we have nuclear, there's other kinds of clean energies. And some of the best resources are in fact in the global south. These places are not simply future climate victims, these places are latent energy superpowers.
My favorite example of this is Chile.
Almost eight years ago now, their government said, wait a second, we can make the cheapest green electricity on Earth. We have hydropower, we have solar power, we have wind power, and the best resources anywhere in the world.
So, let's start by making a lot of green electricity. And then they said, because of that we can also make green hydrogen cheaper than anywhere else. And then Japan was like, hello, we want your green hydrogen, can you ship it to us?
SPEAKER_11: Is that possible? Totally. And Japan's like, we will also give you money to pay for these projects, we'll loan you money to pay for these projects, could you please use Japanese technology? So they're using Japanese turbines, electrolyzers, they're using Japanese ships to haul the ammonia around. So Japan gets rich on this, Chile gets rich on this. Win-win.
SPEAKER_03: Totally win-win.
SPEAKER_11: And that model, other countries are looking at that going, I want some of that. And that's why I like this vision of abundance.
Fifteen years ago, solar was the most expensive power.
SPEAKER_03: Now it is the cheapest form of electricity, right? Which is astonishing.
SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_11:
It's totally amazing. And a whole bunch of people are like, now we're done.
And I'm like, no, we can do that with everything.
SPEAKER_11: We can do that with wind, we can do that with nuclear, we can do that with geothermal. But these projects take time, money, and people.
We need to develop the human capital as part of these investment projects for decades. And innovation.
We need much more energy in many places, much cheaper, that's an innovation agenda. For solar, that was the United States, Germany, China, and others acting together. Well if that's the recipe, we can do that again. We're already doing it with electric vehicles and clean hydrogen production.
We can certainly do it by turning electricity into fuels.
It sounds like the climate discussion needs to be kind of like improv, that it's a yes and sort of thing.
SPEAKER_11: I'm so glad you said that.
SPEAKER_11: So many people don't understand my love of improv comedy.
It is a yes and circumstance.
SPEAKER_11: Because mostly it is about room for agreement.
Where do you find the point where everybody's like, I can agree on that? One of the things I love about the infrastructure bill,
one of the things I love about the inflation reduction act, neither of them had the word climate in it. They were both massive climate bills. That was a way to get everybody on the same page. Nationwide they basically tripled the clean energy research budget. That's a good start. But that made it all of 1% of GDP. And for comparison, we spent twice that on pharmaceuticals. So I think it's fair to say we should get going. We should spend a lot more money.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_11: We've done World War II. We've done the Marshall Plan. We've done the Space Shot. We actually know how to move really quickly as a nation. We did this for COVID.
Collective action, building together is what makes the difficult possible and nourishes the soul through mission and purpose.
We know what to do and we can act not out of anger or fear,
but out of generosity and common purpose, bringing aspiration and humility together. We're going to build a thriving, vibrant, exciting world full of potential that's going to be built on the back of infrastructure, innovation and investment that will harness the abundant, sustainable, cheap energy
that is our planet's endowment.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_03: A world of abundant, clean energy for everyone. That is the goal.
But what about in the short term?
Take Detroit. This once wealthy city has been through some seriously hard times. How is it rebuilding itself so that everyone here can thrive while dealing with extreme heat, flooding and other climate problems? Anika Goss is looking to Detroit's past to plan its future.
SPEAKER_05: I am a third generation Detroiter. My grandmother moved to Detroit in 1936 during the Great Migration
and brought all of her southern ways with her. She owned a home and knew that home ownership would create wealth and opportunity for her growing family. Up until the late 1950s, Detroit was a haven for middle class families living in neighborhoods where there was green space and community connectivity and opportunity. My grandmother, she had this amazing garden and it was just, it was abundant. There were all kinds of flowers and food, you know, she grew vegetables back there and it was just a magical place for a little girl. I mean what you're describing is a Detroit that, yes, has huge problems, segregation.
SPEAKER_03: But at the same time, a woman, she can have a job, she can own a house,
she can raise her family, she can have fresh fruits and vegetables.
SPEAKER_05: It was certainly a place where you could gain economic opportunity faster than you can now.
My grandmother's Detroit is not the Detroit that I live in today. All of those sites where there was manufacturing and industrial sites
that led to our economic boom, many stand vacant and abandoned. These industrial sites have led to dangerous contamination
to our land and our water and our air.
SPEAKER_03: So just lay it out for us, for people who maybe don't see, like how is there a link between economic inequality and climate change?
SPEAKER_05: You know, I'm so surprised that it feels like separate problems, but I'm also really glad that people are asking. Because if you're living around and working in a community that is low income,
where there are fewer jobs, the housing is deteriorated, this is a neighborhood that's also more likely to be closer to a factory that's emitting pollutants, likely to have water that's contaminated, probably has fewer parks and fewer intentional green spaces. The people who are living in those communities are at risk for climate impacts first. So we have to do something in those neighborhoods right away.
SPEAKER_03: So what can this healthier future look like? Anika showed me some of the work she's done in partnership with different neighborhoods in Detroit to make them both more enjoyable and more resilient.
First, she took me to the Circle Forest. It's an oasis right in the middle of the city.
SPEAKER_05: This is six lots that were vacant, and we all work together with this community to build a forest. Beautiful, and a great example of how nonprofits can work with communities to transform them into sustainable, welcoming places.
SPEAKER_05: We might have a good idea about gardens and tree planting, but this is where people live. And so you ask first. This is a new effort of this idea of a resilient neighborhood, calling it that.
SPEAKER_05: So these are large tracts of vacancy that can be used to provide environmental sustainability, community resilience, and beauty.
SPEAKER_05: Watch for the poison ivy. It's not pretend.
SPEAKER_03: Last up, I got to talk to some rice farmers, a father and daughter duo named Jim and Jessica Whitaker, who are changing the way rice is grown on their farm in Arkansas. They are making it much more sustainable. But now comes the hard part, convincing all the other farmers to use their techniques too.
So let's go back to how you got to be such a big supplier of rice in this country. You tell a story about how you were 22, and you were like, I'm going to start my own farm. But not that easy.
SPEAKER_15: No, it's not. Let me tell you something about renting a farm when you're 22 years old. No one rents you a farm unless no one else wants to rent it.
It was a big piece of land. It was cash rent. I mean, the states were set. We were doomed to fail.
And we weren't focused on environmental sustainability back then. We were focused on economic sustainability. How do we make higher yield? How do we use less fertilizer? How do we get to the next year and feed our family? It happens that economic and environmental sustainability go hand in hand, along with social sustainability. As we use less fertilizer, use less water, our yields start going up.
Can you spell out for me what the problem is with rice when it comes to the environment?
SPEAKER_15: Soil is full of microbes. And what they're doing in the soil on a basic level is they're down there chewing away, eating up the biomass that's left over from the crop before us. And out of that comes methane, the same way it happens in cattle operations or whatever.
SPEAKER_15: But you decided to do it a different way.
SPEAKER_15: We do it a little bit differently. Arkansas is a very water-rich state, but we have a dry season. Right in the middle of summer is a dry season. So when we dry the soil, that anaerobic microbial that's living in that soup, that mushy soil, either dies or goes dormant.
SPEAKER_15: So we break his life cycle and then it stops emitting methane, but it doesn't hurt the rice. It actually helps the rice when we use less water.
SPEAKER_15:
We have less runoff, less erosion, less nutrients leaving our field. Nothing leaves our field unless we want it to.
SPEAKER_14: We started tracking this. We saw that our water use was down and we thought, okay, well, we need to add to that. Let's add more data points to that. Let's add our fertilizer. Let's add our fuel usage. And so we really started recording all this stuff by hand in just an Excel spreadsheet.
We didn't know what we were doing. But you knew you were on to something. Yes. So we started recording everything.
SPEAKER_03:
Do you remember if there was a moment when the two of you thought, like, what we're doing, it shouldn't be special to us. Why aren't more people? To collect the data, have the equipment and the cloud-based technology and stuff in the field to record it, it's just, it's massively time consuming. And consumers don't pay for it.
SPEAKER_15:
Well, and people like us, why would you want to do it? I mean, take a walk through your supermarket. Everything's sustainable. You can put whatever you want to on a package.
SPEAKER_14:
There's no rules. There's no standards. So we're trying to make that standard. We live and work in Southeast Arkansas. Our town has 4,000 residents and one stoplight. The nearest airport, Starbucks, shopping mall, Whole Foods is two hours away in any direction.
Without places like this and farmers like us, you'd be hungry, naked and sober.
I'm a farmer, but not in the way you might think. I don't drive the tractors and I don't plant the rice, but I know how to take what my dad has learned and what he is doing and share that with others.
We are going to work with farmers in Southeast Arkansas to educate them about the benefits of growing sustainable rice.
Let me tell you why it's important. There are 400 million acres of rice grown globally and our methods, if used, can reduce greenhouse gas by 50%, reduce water use by 50%, increase yields to feed a hungry world.
SPEAKER_03: We hear a lot about how weather has gotten more extreme, flooding, heat. What's it been like in Arkansas?
So in 2016, we had a 500-year flood. We had a picture of our place flooded, 14 inches of rain. That was a 500-year flood. It hurt a lot of people.
SPEAKER_15:
And then we had a 1,000-year flood and we lost so many acres. And you know, when houses get flooded in rural communities, they don't come back.
I mean, when you have whole neighborhoods get flooded, they don't rebuild them. They don't come back.
SPEAKER_14: I feel like almost every day I'm getting a notification from the Weather Channel of an excessive heat warning or thunderstorm warning or hail threat. You know, you don't really know what you're going to expect.
When you think about what it will be like, I don't know, five years, ten years for someone to go into the supermarket and think, oh, right, I need to get rice off my grocery list. What ideally would you like to see on the shelf there?
SPEAKER_03:
So I think it's going to change because I'd like to study what companies want. I mean, if you figure out what they want, then you know what to give them.
SPEAKER_15:
And when you read their sustainability goals, they're all saying they're going to be net zero. The only way they can be net zero is they bring the farmer into the loop. So we're able to do this in five years. Everybody's doing these practices. The U.S. rice industry will be the most sustainable industry in the world.
SPEAKER_03: Can you do it?
SPEAKER_15: Oh, yeah. It's about to happen.
The path won't be easy and we've got a lot of work ahead, but I hope hearing this leaves you feeling a little more energized about the possibilities and intrigued to watch the whole show, including my visit to an antique electric vehicle collection.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, antique EVs. Who knew? Watch TED Explores a new climate vision right now at TED.com. It'll help you get through 2024 and it's one for the whole family. Seriously. Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_06: Support for TED Talks Daily comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who switched to Odoo.
Odoo is the affordable all in one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price.
To learn more, visit Odoo.com slash TED Talks. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash TED Talks. Odoo. Modern management made simple.
